A disc drive is typically built with the intention of providing an internal environment within which the various components of a disc drive may operate. It has been shown that an internal environment with high particulate contamination can have an adverse impact on the performance of a disc drive. Therefore, various schemes have been devised to reduce particulate contamination, and some of these involve the use of a filter.
In the disc drive, there is generally one or more discs designed to rotate during drive operations. The discs may be arranged coaxially to form a disc stack which is mounted such that the disc stack is displaced from the center of a substantially rectangular disc drive housing, leaving room for a rotatable actuator to bring read/write heads across surfaces of the discs for reading date from or writing data to discs. As the disc stack is rotated during drive operations, it is hoped that the air movement generated will at the same time provide an air flow through a filter located adjacent the disc stack so as to facilitate the entrapment of particles by the filter. This alone, however, may not achieve the clean-up rate required for the internal environment to remain sufficiently free of particulate contamination. Furthermore, there may be certain “dead” spaces, especially at corners, where the air will not be replaced by the generated air flow. Locating a filter in such corners with the intention of maximizing space utilization may unfortunately have an adverse effect on the efficiency of the filter, which in turn may result in poor particulate contamination control.
The following description sets forth how embodiments of the present invention can provide a viable solution to these and other problems, and offer other advantages over the prior art.